Servant of the State

Is China’s most eminent writer a reformer or an apologist?

Where dissidents like Liu Xiaobo sought to challenge the state, Wang Meng has set out, nimbly but cautiously, to humanize it.Credit Illustration by Finn Graff

On the afternoon of October 18, 2009, the writer Wang Meng addressed a full house at the Frankfurt International Book Fair. It was the fair’s last day, and China, the festival’s guest of honor that year, had worked hard to demonstrate its cultural appeal. The secretary-designate of China’s Communist Party had joined the German chancellor in opening a China-themed hall. The pianist Lang Lang shared a stage with German artists at the old Frankfurt opera house. There were performances of the Peking Opera, displays of Chinese folk arts, and forums on China’s growing economic and political might.

Wang, who is seventy-six, is perhaps the most famous living writer in China. A short, trim man with black-rimmed glasses and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, he has published widely in nearly every genre, and, having once served as China’s culture minister, is accustomed to ceremony. In Frankfurt, Wang was asked to describe the state of literature in his country. “Chinese literature is developing very quickly, and so is the readers’ taste,” he said, in bland, diplomatic language. “Chinese literature is at its best of times. . . . China has over a hundred literary journals, many writers of serious literature, and over a thousand novels published each year. One can say China is a big literary nation.”

His remarks were greeted with derision on the Chinese Internet. One blogger compared contemporary Chinese literature to Chinese manufactured goods: low price, high quantity, little added value, no brand. A popular young blogger named Li Chengpeng called Wang a liar and a toady: most literary publications in China, he said, “are full of falsity and perversity, with many writers taking money from the state and creating junk and gibberish. . . . Wang Meng’s way of thinking is that of the eminent men in all fields: as long as it’s large, plentiful, and junky, everything Chinese . . . is at the best of times.” Within days, the blog post had received more than a hundred and fifty thousand hits and thousands of reader comments. To young Chinese bloggers, Wang seemed like another aging sellout, a mouthpiece of a soulless establishment.

The denunciations were reminiscent of a controversy that beset Wang in the nineteen-nineties. In 1994, a young Nanjing critic named Wang Binbin published an article entitled “The Too-Clever Chinese Writer.” Many Chinese writers, Wang Binbin contended, had well-developed survival skills but lacked the courage to tell the truth when it was dangerous to do so. One of his examples was Wang Meng.

Wang responded with a couple of essays, insisting that the young critic was going after famous people, Red Guards style, chiefly in order to make his name. But Wang’s contemptuous tone grated, especially when he attacked the literature professor turned human-rights activist Liu Xiaobo. In a piece entitled “Black Horse and Black Pony,” Wang derided Wang Binbin (the titular “black pony”) as a cheap copy of Liu, the “black horse” from the previous decade. Liu, the recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, was a brave activist during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and was imprisoned for a year and a half afterward. He spent the nineties in and out of jail and labor camps. Kept under police surveillance, banned from teaching or publishing in China, he could write only for dissident magazines in Hong Kong or overseas, relegated to a shadowy existence in the marginalized dissident community.

In his essay, Wang mocked Liu ruthlessly:

About ten years ago, a black horse appeared on the literary scene; he struck a majestic posture, as though he commanded the wind and clouds and could easily force ten thousand troops to retreat; he talked the grand talk of someone who considered himself original and everyone and everything else beneath him. . . . His self-trumpeting and self-aggrandizement, his yelling and selling, have been mocked in private, but have also attracted some attention. He was even cheered on by a few youngsters who have always resented the famous and the eminent but were born too late to get a chance to put the tall paper hats on those heads and parade them at the street rallies.

After this caustic reference to the Cultural Revolution, Wang concluded, “He was a hero for a moment, but where is he now?”

The superior tone was chilling. How could Wang, with all his privileges, attack a political prisoner who was unable to speak publicly? Many felt that Wang had sunk to character assassination. “Among young people, Wang Meng is finished,” a Beijing friend told me. Wang’s reputation among liberal intellectuals never fully recovered.

In Chinese cultural life, it was one of those moments of almost tectonic slippage, in which a fault line becomes a chasm. Wang could be caricatured as a court poet, and nothing more; his antagonist, Liu, as a passive martyr, and nothing more. The stark contrast provided blinding clarity, with an emphasis on blinding; it was false to both.

I’ve known both men since those days in the early nineties, and, during the furor over Wang’s Frankfurt remarks last year, I e-mailed him to express my chagrin. Wang’s reply was prompt: “No problem. Whatever. I don’t have time to worry about this sort of thing, and I’m long used to it. Thanks.”

Two months later, in December of 2009, a Chinese court sentenced Liu to eleven years in prison on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.” Liu’s main offense was to have been the co-author of Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto that called on the Communist Party to enact political reforms and uphold the constitutional rights of Chinese citizens. The document was first signed by some three hundred mainland intellectuals—I was among them—and then by thousands of Chinese around the world. The heavy sentence prompted international outrage. I couldn’t help wondering about Wang’s reaction. I e-mailed him again. This time, there was no reply.

I first met Wang Meng not long after his departure from the Cultural Ministry. Despite his national stature, I sensed a vulnerability about him. He had incurred the wrath of people at both ends of the Chinese ideological spectrum. He was the only Chinese minister who had refused to visit “the heroic soldiers wounded in crushing counter-revolutionary rioters” at Tiananmen Square, an act of disloyalty that caused him to lose political favor. Yet, because he had taken his stand in the meekest possible fashion (he pleaded illness), it earned him no admiration among the rebels. Hard-liners and dissidents alike had a simple question: Are you with us or against us? Wang had no simple answer. Shaped by some of the most turbulent decades of twentieth-century political history, he found himself with an abiding aversion to turbulence.

The courtier was once a rebel. Wang Meng was born in 1934, in Beijing, to parents who had arrived from a rural backwater in Hebei province. When he was three, the Japanese invaded China and occupied the city, and Wang remembers having to bow to the bayonet-wielding Japanese guards at the city gates. His father, who had studied in Beijing and Japan, was enamored of all things modern and Western. A college teacher and a dreamy idealist, he was prone to grand speeches yet was incompetent in practical matters or office politics. As his career foundered, his large family struggled with debt and hunger. The household wasn’t exactly tranquil: during fights, Wang Meng’s widowed aunt would pour a pot of hot green-bean soup onto his father, and his father would get drunk and pull down his pants to embarrass the women.

Wang was a brilliant student, who won essay and debate competitions, along with tuition waivers. His teachers loved him. But secretly he was reading leftist books and becoming enthralled by radical ideas. His early political inclinations, he joked later, were revealed in a third-grade poem:

If I were a tiger,

I would devour rich people.

Soon, Communists recruited him, and he set to work as a middle-school agitator. He was barely fourteen when the Party accepted him as a full-fledged member. A year later, the Party took over China. “From this day on, the Chinese people have stood up!” Mao Zedong declared in Tiananmen Square as the nation rejoiced in October of 1949. The euphoria of the first days of the People’s Republic is among the dearest of Wang’s memories. He was elated by the passionate rallies, the parades, the comradely meetings and songs. He marvelled at how, within a week, Beijing cleaned up its gigantic garbage dump, a notorious problem in the old capital. The revolution, he believed, had swept away the degenerate old way of life that trapped his parents and kept China backward.

Wang, still in his teens, was assigned to a district branch of the Communist Youth League. Always drawn to literature, he spent a full year working on a novel—a lyrical portrait of a group of radicalized teen-agers, romance mixing with innocent passion for the revolution—that ended up stuck with editors amid rounds of revision. But his first novella, “A Young Man Comes to the Organizational Department,” caused an uproar when it was published, in 1956. The story, set in a district Party office, depicts an idealistic young cadreman much like Wang himself clashing with a range of senior Party officials, variously jaded, savvy, and corrupt. At a time when literature served essentially as Party propaganda, the unflattering portrayal of Party officials was unusual. In the newspapers, apparatchiks accused Wang of harboring unhealthy skepticism and bourgeois sentiments. Given the temper of the time, Wang’s budding career could easily have been destroyed.

Then something extraordinary happened: Chairman Mao learned of the controversy and intervened. At a Central Party Committee meeting, Mao praised Wang’s novella as a work “against bureaucracy.” Mao had always worried about the erosion of revolutionary fervor by bureaucratization. “I don’t know Wang Meng, but his critics don’t convince me,” Mao said about the obscure twenty-two-year-old. “Bureaucracy doesn’t exist in Beijing? I support anti-bureaucracy. Wang Meng has literary talent.”

Mao’s words bestowed not only the highest political protection—the attacks ceased—but also instant fame. Wang’s luck had turned, it seemed. Soon he was married, to Cui Ruifang, a young woman he had met through Youth League work and had courted with passionate love letters. She was a year older than him, and had great faith in his literary abilities.

The political reprieve was short-lived. A few months later, Mao launched the Anti-Rightist campaign. In the ensuing frenzy, half a million people were denounced and sent to labor camps. Wang proved too minor a figure to be worthy of the Chairman’s continued attention. Stripped of his Party membership, he was sent to a mountainous farm outside Beijing. There, for the next four years, he did menial labor during the day and participated in “self-criticism meetings” in the evenings.

Most of the “Rightists” were, like him, true believers and Party loyalists, and their ordeal drove many to depression, divorce, and suicide. Wang underwent a period of crushing self-doubt. He convinced himself that he deserved this retribution for the privileges he had enjoyed, and worked assiduously to redeem himself through hard labor. Carrying rocks and planting trees, he wrote later, improved his health, which had been delicate since childhood.

In 1962, Wang was allowed to move back to the city and to Cui. He and his wife both got teaching jobs, and, for the first time, they and their two young sons (occasional visits home had been permitted during the exile) were able to live together, albeit in a one-room apartment. Still, Wang longed for a writing career and literary recognition. He had published very little, and his fiction was criticized as overly intellectual. He knew nothing about workers and peasants, deemed to be the only worthy subject for “new literature.” Meanwhile, Mao, having broken with the Soviet Union, was constantly fingering traitors within the Party. The political climate was again becoming fraught.

In the fall of 1963, Wang applied for a transfer to the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, an area in the far west populated mostly by Chinese Muslims. He was answering the Party’s call for writers to “delve deep into the grass roots,” but the transfer would also remove him from the turbulent political center. That winter, the Wang family packed their few belongings and boarded a westbound train for the ninety-hour ride.

“How long do you think we’ll be there?” Cui asked as the train pulled out of Beijing. “A few years,” Wang replied. “At the most, five years.” Their stay on the western frontier lasted sixteen years.

Xinjiang suited Wang. He marvelled at the region’s beauty: magnificent snow-capped mountains, rocky deserts, towering poplars, lakes that seemed as blue as the sky. He was charmed by the Uighurs’ approach to life—by the way peasant families grew roses even when they didn’t have enough to eat. He relished the flatbread and lamb that dominated local cuisine, was moved by the melancholy Uighur songs, and was enchanted by the “symphonic music” of their language. When he discovered that he was the subject of a fengsha—an official ban on a person and his work (the term literally means “seal off to kill”)—he put his energies into learning Uighur, which was rare for a Han, and won him great affection among the villagers. A daughter was born; Cui and Wang named her for Yining, the Uighur town where they lived.

In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. In Beijing and other big cities, the Red Guards ransacked homes, burned books, and beat up teachers, sometimes torturing and killing them. In Yining, Wang burned all his personal correspondence. But geography did help insulate him; the campaign had lost much of its severity by the time it reached the remote border town, and Wang was protected by his Uighur friends. An elderly peasant who sheltered him said, “Don’t worry, Old Wang, any country needs three kinds of men: the king, the courtesan, and the poet. Sooner or later, you will return to your post as a poet.”

With the death of Mao, in 1976, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Though the political climate remained uncertain, Wang began to write and circulate his stories, taking care to avoid anything politically risky. One afternoon in 1978, he was making dumplings at home when he saw his wife rushing home through the rain, waving a copy of People’s Literature, which had just arrived in the mail. “Your story is in it!” she yelled as she came inside. Wang grabbed the copy with his flour-stained hands: it was the foremost literary journal in China.

In less than a year, Wang had regained his Party membership, and, after a quarter century of limbo, his first novel was published, to acclaim. (Later, it was the basis of a popular movie.) Then came an order of transfer from the Beijing Writers’ Association. In June, 1979, the Wangs boarded an eastbound train. A throng of Uighur and Han friends came to the station to say goodbye. When the train started moving, Cui buried her face in her hands and wept.

Wang received a monthly salary and subsidized housing from the writers’ association. All he had to do was keep writing and publishing. The family moved into a hundred-square-foot room in a noisy building, with a washroom in the hallway and a loudspeaker blaring outside in the evenings. In the sweltering summer heat, he would strip off his shirt and, wearing only a pair of shorts, produce page after page.

After decades of repression, the hunger for new writing in China was tremendous. Literary journals thrived. In 1980, People’s Literature had a circulation of 1.5 million; other major literary magazines enjoyed readerships almost as robust. Wang struck a chord with his deftly turned portraits of innocents and true believers struggling to survive in a dark time. He was also becoming a savvy cultural official. A quick-witted speaker with impressive rhetorical and political skills, Wang was elected to the governing board of the Chinese Writers’ Association. He pushed for more liberal policies but maintained a warm, deferential relationship with senior Party leaders. In 1985, he was elected to the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

The next year, Wang’s second novel, “Huodong Bian Renxing” (the title refers to a Japanese toy that changes shape when you play with it), was published. Widely considered his best novel, it was set in nineteen-forties Beijing and based on Wang’s own childhood experiences, painting a bleak picture of life in “old China.” The book depicts two parents trapped in an unhappy marriage, and their son’s mounting belief in revolution. The year after its publication, Wang became China’s cultural minister.

Years later, when someone remarked that Wang was “a nice guy but had no achievements as a minister,” he protested, “But I lifted the ban on night clubs!” Wang was a decidedly liberal minister. He pushed for greater openness and pluralism in the arts, brought Western artists like Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo to perform in China, and tried to invigorate state-funded enterprises with some market measures.

Yet the ferment of the late nineteen-eighties made such gestures seem pallid. Wenhua re—“culture fever”—was taking hold. “Emancipating the mind” was a Party slogan at the time, but younger writers and critics took the notion much farther than officialdom ever contemplated. They had little time for Wang’s cautious meliorism. The moment belonged to the likes of Liu Xiaobo.

Liu, who was born in 1955 to provincial intellectual parents, spent his teen-age years in Inner Mongolia, where his father had been sent as part of Mao’s Down to the Countryside movement, and he worked as an unskilled laborer during his early adulthood. After Mao’s death, he went to college at Jilin and did his doctoral work in literature at Beijing Normal University, where he began teaching in 1984. In the mid-eighties, he caused a sensation with scathing critiques of prominent scholars and intellectuals of the previous generation, whose work he dismissed as derivative and mediocre. Some of his more mischievous assertions were made during a 1988 interview with a Hong Kong magazine: “After a hundred years of colonialism, Hong Kong became what we see today. China is so big, of course, that it would take three hundred years of colonialism to make it like Hong Kong today.” Delightedly piling outrage upon outrage, he pronounced Confucius “a mediocre talent,” and called for China to be thoroughly Westernized. He dismissed the writer Gao Xingjian, who went on to win the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature, as a rank imitator. He claimed that there was “nothing good” to say about mainland Chinese authors, not “because they were not allowed to write but because they cannot write.” For an iconoclast like Liu, cultural critique and political reform were part of the same struggle.

The boisterous scene of wenhua re was less congenial to Wang, who detected symptoms of a “messiah complex,” the fantasy that culture and society could be transformed, in one swoop, by collective will power and action—the same fantasy that, he felt, had spurred the Chinese revolution. A lighthearted vision of political reform and its travails plays out in a story that Wang published in 1989, “Tough Porridge,” which won China’s top literary prize for short fiction. It’s about a large family that has always eaten rice porridge and pickled vegetables for breakfast. The grandfather, a revered but open-minded patriarch, offers to relinquish his authority over the menu to others. When the family’s retainer of four decades takes charge, she starts skimping on ingredients and, with the money she saves, buying the grandfather ginseng royal jelly for his health. Soon, the trendy grandson is serving an all-Western breakfast, to which some family members secretly add Chinese spices, causing digestive woes. Various other reforms are attempted, including democratic voting. People start eating separately. A great-grandson goes off to work at a joint-venture company. The intellectual son and his wife move abroad. Eventually, though, they all return to the porridge breakfast, so plain and so soothing.

Nobody was in a mood to be soothed when, in mid-April, 1989, students started to demonstrate in Tiananmen Square, following the death of Hu Yaobang, the liberal Party Secretary who had been forced to resign a couple of years earlier. For many liberals, it was a stand-up-and-be-counted moment. Liu Xiaobo was on a fellowship at Columbia University at the time; when he learned of the protests, he promptly gave up the fellowship and flew back.

But Wang felt dread, not elation, as the demonstrations grew. At one point, he spent seven hours talking down his twenty-year-old daughter, after which he accompanied her to her university, and waited outside the campus gate until she persuaded her class not to join the demonstrations. While he was abroad with a delegation in Europe and Egypt, the situation rapidly deteriorated. On June 4th, the nineteen-eighties—idealistic, naïve, fragile—came to a crashing end as the tanks arrived in Tiananmen Square.

The massacre destroyed the tenuous bond between the Party and the intellectuals: some renounced their Party membership and broke with the regime; some went into exile or were jailed. Wang distanced himself from the hard-liners, but he made no renunciations, no protestations. In the eyes of the radicals, he behaved no differently from a host of other cowardly functionaries.

On medical leave, he spent the rest of the summer in Yantai, a seaside town, composing moody, elliptical poems, mourning the passing of an era. On September 4th, the chairman of the People’s Republic of China officially terminated Wang’s ministerial appointment.

In all the years I’ve known Wang, I mentioned Tiananmen to him just once, reporting a remark I’d heard about his “soft landing.” Wang corrected me: “These are the exact words: ‘He flipped a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree backward somersault and landed standing on his feet.” His eyes glinted behind his glasses, and he laughed.

The reality, we both knew, wasn’t so comfortable. In the post-Tiananmen years, Wang was the subject of investigations; some of his former colleagues, including his vice-ministers, distanced themselves from him. Conservative publications denounced him. With Wang newly vulnerable, hard-liners pushed the idea that his “Tough Porridge” was actually a veiled attack on Deng Xiaoping, who, ostensibly retired, was still the supreme power at the time.

It’s hard to convey how unsettling the charge was. China has a long tradition of yingshe, “shadow assassination,” in which writers use allegory to criticize high officials. The Cultural Revolution was, in fact, directly triggered by such suspicions: in 1965, a historical drama written by a Party intellectual was accused of being an oblique attack on Mao. The charge was absurd, but Mao took it seriously; he ordered the newspapers to denounce the author (who eventually died in custody, having been beaten), and the self-fuelling paranoia grew into a frenzied nationwide campaign. So when the accusation about Wang’s story began to spread, Wang responded forcefully. He wrote to Jiang Zemin, the Party chairman; he filed a libel lawsuit; and, devastatingly, he released an obsequious letter that one of his hard-line opponents, the post-purge head of the Chinese Writers’ Association, had privately written to him when he was a newly appointed cultural minister.

Many liberals cheered Wang. Not Liu Xiaobo. Wang disregarded the rules about privacy in publishing the letter, Liu wrote later, “because he thinks that you have to be petty to handle a petty guy, to be a hooligan to fight a hooligan, but he doesn’t seem to understand that this will make all of us hooligans together.” It was a lofty statement of principle, indifferent to the real risk of persecution that Wang faced.

“I lived through fengsha for more than two decades,” Wang told me. “It’s an awful state to be in.” This time, the fengsha was briefer. In the fall of 1991, Wang was allowed to attend a writers’ event in Singapore. A year later, he was appointed to be a member of the Zhengxie, the political consultation body for the government. He retained his benefits and the perks, which are accorded to all former officials by rank. Wang still had, courtesy of the state, his house with a courtyard (later, a large apartment), a secretary, a car, and a driver at his disposal.

Wang gratefully resumed the life of a full-time writer, producing novels, short fiction, criticism, verse, reviews, lectures, autobiography, and even translations of some John Cheever stories. In a series of brilliant essays on several interlinked debates over the “commercialization” of culture, he eloquently defended cultural diversity, market reform, and an end to China’s authoritarian traditions; he also championed a hugely popular and controversial young novelist named Wang Shuo, whose “hooligan style” some had condemned as subversive. Then came the Liu Xiaobo attack—the notorious “Black Horse” essay—and the ferocious backlash it inspired.

I first met Liu in early 1991, at a small hot-pot dinner celebrating his release from prison, and recall the glee with which he mocked various cultural luminaries. He provoked an argument after he told a fashionable young novelist at the table that the eminent critic who’d discovered and championed him was nothing but an ignorant trend monger. He could be overbearing, and at times unbearable. But his critical lance was accompanied by genuine courage and political conviction. His role in Tiananmen wasn’t simply that of a cheerleader or provocateur: he tried to negotiate with the Army for the students’ peaceful withdrawal from the square. And he may be the only Tiananmen leader who published a book exposing the movement’s moral failings, not least his own. In the same unsparing spirit that Wang wrote of intellectuals under Mao, Liu detailed the vanity, self-aggrandizement, and factionalism that beset the student activists and their intellectual compadres. He put himself under a harsh light, analyzing his own complex motives: moral passion, opportunism, a yearning for glory and influence.

What was Wang thinking, when he directed his lordly disdain at someone whom the state had all but silenced? The liberal Shanghai intellectual and historian Zhu Xueqin, who wrote a caustic piece about Wang at the time, told me that he still finds the assault unforgivable. In his mind, Wang’s act was luojing xiashi: “dropping a stone over someone’s head after he falls into a well.”

The controversy affected Wang deeply. More than a decade later, he recalled in a memoir that his main fear was the recurring spectre of the Cultural Revolution; he was on guard against any thinking that might push China back onto the “ultra-leftist track.” He was particularly incensed by the suggestion that China’s problems should be blamed on the lack of courage among its intellectuals and writers, when so many of them had been persecuted, even executed or driven to suicide. “Why are you so bloodthirsty?” he demanded. But Wang also chided himself for rushing into these debates with too little sympathy for the other side.

Wang’s most ambitious writing project of the nineties was four interlinked novels he dubbed the “Seasons” series, the last of which appeared in 2000. They constituted a fictional chronicle of the People’s Republic, as experienced by his generation of revolutionary intellectuals. The reception was lukewarm. The culture fever of the eighties had given way to a focus on economic growth, propelled by Deng Xiaoping’s push for “marketization.” On the political front, the Party enforced a no-debate policy, keeping a tight lid on the intellectuals and the media. While the population turned to the absorbing business of accumulating wealth—“To get rich is glorious,” Deng had said—literary journals found themselves with a dwindling readership. The rise of a lively pop culture—one increasingly drawn to the Internet and new media—further dampened public interest in serious fiction. But even within the literary community the “Seasons” series was little admired. Critics complained that Wang’s narrative style, exuberant and witty at its best, had grown garrulous and showy. His language lacked polish and restraint. Descriptions were heaps of hyperbolic adjectives and set phrases, a murky torrent.

Once when I was with Wang and Cui, she mentioned one of the “Seasons” novels and asked what I thought of it. Fumbling for a response, I said that I hadn’t read it yet. It would have been more accurate to say I wasn’t able to finish it. Wang was quick to change the subject, but I could sense his disappointment. He clearly felt that the true value of these novels hadn’t been understood. Nobody else, he felt, would have written about the Chinese revolutionary experiences with such candor and sympathy.

If you’re wondering whether an important literary work has fallen victim to critical trends, here’s a sample, taken from a long passage on Mao:

In the context of the Chinese revolution and the world revolution, [the Cultural Revolution] was a people’s carnival, Mao Zedong’s poetic rhapsody. . . . It was a carnival of heroism and idealism, the thinking of the avant-garde. It was a carnival of will power, of concept and language, of history created in search of a little new meaning. . . . Mao Zedong let the young people liberate themselves to the extreme for a time, got rid of all ropes and rules. It excited all of mankind, the entire world. It was a little cruel. But is all that obedience and rigidity not cruel to life and to youth? The Cultural Revolution was indeed thoroughly thrilling. That’s why the Berlin Wall was covered with West German Red Guards’ posters, and California’s Berkeley established the People’s Republic of Berkeley, and the French Culture Minister, the writer Malraux, greatly admired Mao Zedong, and later, many years later, the boxing fans all over the world watched on live television: Tyson tattooed his arm with a portrait of Mao.

Setting aside the overwrought prose, what is the reader to make of the suggestion that the Cultural Revolution was just “a little cruel”? A leading contemporary Chinese novelist, widely admired for his laconic style, once told me, “Mao is China’s Hitler,” and he’s far from the only one to think so. Although the Party’s legitimacy remains bound up with Mao, and forthright public criticism of him is still forbidden, many intellectuals consider him a cynical despot and his rule the greatest catastrophe in Chinese history. Even in aesthetic terms, Mao has been widely condemned: critics hold him responsible for violating the elegant, refined Mandarin vernacular with his crude, strident sloganeering. Some contend that, after decades of Communist rule, Mao wenti, “Maospeak,” has seriously contaminated Chinese writing.

It’s an argument with consequences. In a sense, China’s future will be determined by which of the contending interpretations of Mao’s legacy prevails. So it’s notable that, as the “Seasons” series makes clear, Wang’s assessment stops well short of condemnation. “Blaming China’s problems on Mao is simplistic,” Wang told me. “As a politician, Mao’s good deeds and bad deeds were both determined by China’s history and culture. He was a political and literary genius. You know his poetry and calligraphy. And I think he did two great things. The first was leaving Hong Kong alone in 1949, even though at that time he could have taken it over with a brigade. The second was breaking up with the Soviet Union. So he left a window open to the West and got China out of the big socialist family. But you want to talk about Mao’s cruelties? Well, if you recall all the tortures that took place at the Chinese courts, all those slow-cutting executions in past dynasties, he certainly had plenty of predecessors! But this is not yet the time for a real discussion about Mao.”

Other writers offer various explanations for Wang’s reluctance to condemn Mao. “Mao had once helped Wang,” Zhu Xueqin says. “It’s very human that Wang feels grateful. Still, after looking at Mao’s good and bad sides, one ultimately should reject Mao. Wang can’t take that final step. Why? He’s too calculating.” Others think the explanation is generational. “This is a common phenomenon among Wang’s generation of educated Chinese,” Xie Youshun, a noted young literary critic from Fujian, told me. “They tend to be hard on their own biological fathers but absolutely devoted to their spiritual father figures. Wang is not talking out of political expediency, since denouncing Mao is quite fashionable among intellectuals these days. It’s true loyalty.”

Once, when Wang was being interviewed on television, the host asked him whether he’d been brainwashed by Communist ideology. Wang chortled, and said, “Brainwashing? Do you think anyone can take out my brain and give it a wash?” He went on to explain that he chose to embrace revolution and Communism. Then he cited a line from a famous poem by Bei Dao: “I do not believe!” “Well,” Wang said, his face solemn on the screen, his voice rising slightly. “I can say this about my generation: We believe!”

Bei Dao is the Allen Ginsberg of my generation, men and women who, born in the decade straddling the fifties and sixties, grew up in the Cultural Revolution. The themes of his early poetry—alienation, skepticism, personal salvation through romantic love—struck all the keynotes of our journey from Mao’s little red children to bitterly disillusioned adults. But, watching Wang defending his generation’s dignity and their choice to believe, I was touched. In Wang’s avowal, I recognized my father, who, until his death, was willing to revise but not renounce his faith. I was also touched because Wang is one of the few Chinese writers who have taken personal responsibility for their youthful zealotry. Chinese writing about the Maoist purges tended to depict the sufferings of innocent victims, but Wang would describe in mordant detail how nearly all the intellectuals, himself included, enthusiastically participated in the campaigns. There was unsparing honesty and courage in such writing. Yet why did he feel compelled to reaffirm a faith that has brought so much destruction and delusion?

One afternoon last winter, I had tea with Wang in Beijing’s Sanlian café, where he had just autographed copies of his new book. Dressed in dark slacks and a black jacket with a mandarin collar, Wang looked both alert and relaxed. I asked him about the persistent criticism that he is an apologist for the Chinese government. “Churchill once said, ‘I support democracy not because it is so good but because it would be worse without it,’ ” Wang replied, smiling. “My view of the Chinese Communist Party is the same: I support it not because it’s that good but because it would be worse without it. I once told a friend, ‘You are a very capable man, but if you have to govern China it won’t last more than three days before the country falls into chaos and you lose your own head.’ So, I’m not talking about the legitimacy of the Chinese revolution. I’m talking about its inevitability. Let me tell you about my recent visit to Beichuan”—the center of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake. “I stood there looking at the ruins, awe-struck, and it’s absolutely terrifying! Experts tell me a great earthquake like that is caused by an interlinked assortment of underground movements that have been happening for a thousand years. That’s why, when it finally erupts, it must shake heaven and earth.” He took a sip of tea and looked at me closely. “You see what I mean? It’s the same with the Chinese revolution.” The great famine, the Cultural Revolution, the cult of Mao and the Red Guards’ mania, which swallowed up tens of millions of lives: all these are, to him, as inevitable as the eruptions of Mother Earth. Tragic, but also somehow magnificent.

“If the Communists hadn’t won,” I persisted, “isn’t it possible that we Chinese would have suffered less on the path toward modernization?”

Wang wouldn’t admit to regrets; he saw the upheavals as inevitable. “China has a long tradition of violent dynastic changes,” he said. “And what are the two things that excite young people the most? Sex and revolution!”

I pointed out that, despite the revolution’s immense human costs, plenty of the social and moral ills—corruption and inequality—of old China persist.

“Yes, they still do, don’t they?” he said, frowning. And then he sighed. “Jianying, what happened happened a long time ago. I’m not interested in these ‘what if’ questions.”

The conversation reminded me of a story that Wang published in the nineteen-eighties, “Hard Times to Meet.” The protagonist, Wong, seemingly an authorial alter ego, is a prominent Chinese official who meets with an old friend, a Chinese woman who lives in the United States. Preoccupied by the horrors of the Chinese revolution, she insists on having a “deeper discussion” with Wong. Wong mentally rehearses his response: “Those who are terrified by the horrors, please go away. History will not stop its forward march for fear of paying a price. . . . You may feel depressed. You have the right to feel depressed. But I have no right to feel depressed, because I am a master of today’s China.” And yet Wong is made so uneasy by the prospect of this conversation that he goes on a trip to avoid her.

“I am a master of today’s China”: that’s not something Wang ever said to me, but there was no avoiding the pride, and the responsibility, he felt in belonging to the élite of this new China. The revolution was over, the destructive passions were dissipated, and the Party had turned toward a constructive path. Why not be positive and look ahead? As the protagonist in one of his best-known short stories, “Salute from a Bolshevik,” put it, sentimentally, “The dear mother may beat her child, but the child will never resent his mother, for the mother’s anger will fade and she will hold her child and cry over it.”

Last summer, I joined Wang and a group of other writers on a nine-day trip across Xinjiang, sponsored by the Chinese Writers’ Association. Local branches were hosting a program to commemorate Wang’s writings about Xinjiang and to give the writers an opportunity to gather fresh materials from the “grass roots.” Wang’s stories about Uighur life, a series of Chekhov-like tales written in simple, realist language, are among the most moving of his fictional works. Without narrative indulgence, they show an attentiveness to the details of ordinary life, the moody beauty of nature; the tone is of gentle comedy and black humor amid disaster. Reading them, you could feel Wang’s genuine respect for a culture and a people. Given his cosseted existence, I wondered what remained of such connections.

This was my first C.W.A. event, and it was an eye-opener. From arrival to departure, we were looked after. We stayed at four-star hotels, enjoyed sumptuous meals with endless rounds of liquor, listened to speeches by local officials, watched folk performances, attended regional literary festivals. Local officials and guides accompanied us everywhere. There was no free time to roam the streets or meet people on our own. Toward the end of the program, a couple of writers and I decided to venture out by ourselves to a Uighur neighborhood. Two hours later, an anxious local guide found and reprimanded us. “You could be lost,” she said, “and get stabbed in a back alley!” Whenever I asked questions about Han-Uighur conflicts, our hosts looked away and changed the subject. Police cars escorted us when we moved from one town to another.

When we reached Bayandai, the Uighur village where Wang used to live in the nineteen-seventies, a mob of paparazzi descended on him and followed him every step of the way. An elderly man came up and buried his face in Wang’s shoulders and started sobbing. He was a former village head who had known Wang thirty years earlier, and the two men embraced for a long time. What made the scene nearly surreal was the forest of TV cameras and their glaring lights, and a large crowd of onlookers.

One day, a member of our group overheard Wang laughing and talking in Uighur with the chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, and remarked that Wang sounded like “a different Wang Meng.” The Uighur official replied, “Oh, that’s the real Wang Meng, the one from Bayandai!” Later, Wang related this exchange to a largely Uighur audience who packed a conference hall to hear him. He talked about how, at certain times in China, you just can’t be your real self even if you want to. As he spoke, he grew emotional and started chopping the air with his hand. “That’s right—that Uighur-speaking Wang Meng is the real Wang Meng! And the real Wang Meng will always belong to Bayandai, to Xinjiang!” He was almost shouting. The Uighur audience applauded long and hard.

Despite the fame and status he had acquired, there was genuineness and spontaneity in the way that Uighurs interacted with him: they grabbed him, hugged him, cried, laughed, and engaged him in rapid Uighur conversation. One day, during a kitschy “folk” ceremony in a plaza near Kashgar, a Uighur boy danced up to Wang, followed by a troupe of singers and dancers dressed in colorful costumes. Wang started dancing, too, swinging his arms and body and tapping his feet in perfect rhythm, Uighur style. The boy beamed; the crowd cheered wildly. A staged routine had been transformed into an occasion of real merriment.

But such moments were rare among the daily procession of pomp and vacuous speeches. I often wondered how Wang really felt about the extravagance and artificiality of our tour.

On July 5th, just hours after we left Xinjiang, reality intruded. Riots broke out in the region’s capital, triggered by a brawl in southern China in which two Uighurs were slain. By the end of the riots, nearly two hundred people were dead, and almost two thousand injured, most of them Han. As ethnic tensions escalated, the government placed the region under heavy military patrol. Wang kept mute on the subject.

In October, the Chinese media celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Wang was a guest in several talk-show segments that month. During one, he described his deep personal bond with the Uighurs, telling a few well-worn stories from his Xinjiang years—like the one about the time he and a Uighur friend sat by the highway and shared a bottle of liquor, drinking from a bicycle-bell cup. He was warm, self-deprecating, nostalgic. The message was about ethnic harmony and Han-Uighur friendship. But he was mindful of the limits that the state media imposed on discussions of China’s ethnic policies. The riots went unmentioned.

Wang’s pragmatism reminded me of something he had said to me once when his spirits were low. “China is pitiful—any leader who talks about democracy loses his power,” he told me. “With per-capita G.D.P. still so paltry, the country is a paper tiger. The slightest stir of the wind and grass makes the government nervous.” He added, “If only China gets to develop in peace for another twenty years, then the situation will be different. But now?” He sighed. “Well, at least it seems we won’t go back to the Maoist age.”

If the great accommodator allowed himself dreams of social transformation, devotees of social transformation had been growing less averse to accommodation. The year before our tea at the Sanlian café, I’d been at a welcome-back dinner that Liu Xiaobo hosted for my brother, Jianguo, who had just served a nine-year term in prison for pro-democracy activism. For a few months after his release, two policemen followed Jianguo wherever he went. Jianguo, undeterred, talked headily about plans for mobilizing China’s dissidents. At the dinner, Liu tamped down Jianguo’s enthusiasm, and later asked me to caution my brother about his exaggerated expectations. He used a classical formula: “Buyao yilan zhongshan xiao!” “Don’t stand on top of a mountain and think that everything is beneath you!” Recalling Wang’s earlier portrait of the cocky black horse, I couldn’t help smiling.

Liu, once a firebrand who equated moderation with capitulation and politeness with servility, had matured. Even as he solicited signatures for Charter 08, he was gracious toward those who declined to sign. A Shanghai scholar told me that after he decided not to sign—he didn’t want to jeopardize a scholarship fund that he was setting up—Liu told him that he fully understood and respected his decision, that it was important to be able to continue to do one’s work.

Supine acquiescence or intransigent opposition—are those really the choices? Wang’s relationship with the Chinese state is ultimately at the center of his work and life. It is also at the center of the controversies about him. Unlike many Chinese liberal intellectuals, who now stress their independent spirit, Wang does not try to separate himself from the state. “The People’s Republic of China has never been an object outside of me,” he once wrote. “When the water you drink, the food you eat, everything comes from the ‘state,’ when even your shit needs to be handled by the government’s hygiene department, how can you really boast about your distance?”

With his warmth and wit, his optimism, his professed faith in (and gentle criticisms of) the Party, Wang humanizes the state. That’s what makes him such a contentious figure. Jin Zhong, the editor of the magazine Open, a Hong Kong monthly that’s vociferously critical of the Chinese Communist Party, says that Wang reminds him of Zhou Enlai, Mao’s loyal, obedient premier: “Zhou was a beloved figure among Chinese people because he had a charming personality, but he never challenged Mao, and, ultimately, he was in the service of great evil.” Zhang Er, a Chinese poet who now lives in the United States, says, “China is still a culture of master and servants: one person rules from the top, and all others are subservient. Wang is just an outstanding servant.” The Chinese word for “servant” is usually puren, but the word she used was nucai, which can also be translated as “slave material.” She chose the pejorative term carefully, because she regards Wang as a contemporary example of a long Chinese tradition in which the best and brightest of the country loyally served the imperial court.

Some liberals take a gentler view. One of them told me, “If you look at his whole career as a writer and an official, he comes out as a mainstream moderate. What he embodies is zhongyong zhidao, the middle way.” He was using a Confucian term, alluding to a tradition in which a true gentleman is one who avoids extremes, takes a reasonable measure of all things under heaven, and arrives at an ideal balance.

There is even a sense in which Wang and Liu Xiaobo, seeming opposites, have been participants in a common cause. Liu, from his radical anti-Communist youth, matured into a champion of nonrevolutionary political reform: he continued to be critical of the government but gave it credit for economic reforms and for those instances where it displayed tolerance. “I have no enemy and no hatred,” Liu said at his trial. In an article published last February, he wrote that political reform “should be gradual, peaceful, orderly and controllable,” that “the order of a bad government is better than the chaos of anarchy.” Wang—often from within the palace gates—has been a nimble and persistent advocate of liberalization and tolerance, having battled against the hard-liners throughout his official and literary careers. The fact that the two men have moved toward the center surely says a great deal about where China is today.

Zhongyong zhidao: for all the radical attempts of the past century to sweep China’s “feudal tradition” into the dustbin of history, Confucianism—with its emphasis on benevolent rule, refinement, and social harmony—is enjoying a major revival here. You see it in popular TV lectures on the Analects, in best-selling books about Confucianism and Taoism, in the vogue for reading classics among schoolchildren and adults. It’s in the new government slogan of “building a harmonious society,” in Premier Wen Jiabao’s penchant for peppering his speeches with classical quotations, in the state-funded establishment of Confucius Institutes abroad. So much of the contemporary culture of the state—the bureaucracy, the power hierarchy, the theatricality and sonorous rhetoric—represents a return to an old imperial manner. Certainly Wang’s own sensibilities and talents are continuous with the Confucian tradition.

Confucius was also an indefatigable traveller, and Wang himself shows no signs of slowing down. In September, two weeks before Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize was announced, Wang gave a talk at Harvard’s Asia Center. Before he arrived, he lamented to me how little dialogue there had been, in the post-1989 era, between Chinese and American writers—less, he said, than between Chinese and American military officials. He had prepared his talk in English, in the hopes of speaking across a chasm. At Harvard, he described his childhood deprivations and his youthful involvement in the Chinese revolution. He recalled a conversation he had had when his grandson turned fourteen, the age at which Wang joined the Communist Party. When he criticized the boy for spending too much time on computer games, he replied, “Poor Grandpa, I’m sure you had no toys when you were a kid. If you had a childhood without toys, what else could you do except join the revolution?”

Wang smiled, and said, “I think perhaps he is right. Times are different, the world has changed, so has China. I can’t imagine that my grandson’s generation will copy my path in life. But I firmly believe that all governments in the world have an obligation to provide sufficient toys and good books for the children and young people. Otherwise, the young people have the right to join a revolution, to overthrow that useless government.” The audience applauded loudly. But Wang was not finished. Departing from his prepared script, he said, “I have mentioned the past repeatedly, which reminds me of Barbra Streisand’s song in ‘The Way We Were.’ ” As the audience laughed, he repeated some of the famous lyrics: “If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?” And he continued, soberly, “I’d like to tell you, if I had the chance to do it all again, I would and I could as I did.”

And, in the manner of an emissary from an earlier, courtlier era, he pledged to all his friendship. Perhaps it was too much to ask for regrets. Wang, like many of his protagonists, really does evoke the image of the good official from the Confucian literati: someone loyal to the emperor and the state, compassionate toward the people, diligent in his duties, devoted not to changing the system but to making it work better. As with all who dedicate their lives to serving a great center of power and culture, his legacy—his achievements and compromises—will be assessed accordingly. ♦

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